Up in northern Minnesota along the Gunflint Trail a major forest fire is slowly coming under control. A community network and citizen media initiative called Boreal Access is keeping people up-to-date online and aggregating a number of the local blogs.
How do we learn from this effort and small town projects like Northfield.Org and Locally Grown […]
TechTalk public television show host Susan McKinnell interviewed Steven Clift about e-democracy including Issues Forums. TechTalk is produced by the University of Minnesota and appears on a number of public television stations.
Watch their full 30 minute show on E-Government from their website or jump right into the 12 minute interview (requires QuickTime for best quality) […]
We’ve submitted local Issues Forums and our use of the open source GroupServer technology in the NetSquared competition.
We share the stage with 150 exciting projects - the top 20 get to attend their conference in May. This is the best way for us to send a couple of volunteers into the web 2.0 mix […]
Are you tired of the highly partisan use of the Internet in politics? Do you have a vision for something different that brings people and communities together rather than simply tearing politicians apart?
I’ll (Steven Clift) be in Boston for a number of conferences from Thursday, February 22 through Saturday, February 24. Let me know - […]
Last weekend (Jan 25th-28th), Dan Jellinek visited St. Paul, Minnesota from his home in the UK (where he is co-chair of the Brighton & Hove Issues forum steering committee) for the first face to face meeting of the E-Democracy.Org board, since it expanded early last year.
The board met all day on Jan 27th to […]
In response to my ‘2 Posts Per Day = A Restriction on Free Speech?‘ post, Andy Roberts posted another complaint about how E-Democracy.Org forums use “reply to sender” as opposed to “reply to group.” This resulted in an exchange between Andy Roberts and Steve clift - which ended up on Andy’s Blog.
“The fear of accident […]
One of the cornerstone characteristics of E-Democracy.Org issues forums, has always been that we limit each participant to 2 post per day (which is now 2 posts per 24 hours). Our goal has always been to encourage as many different people as possible to participate and early on we choose to accomplish this by […]
The other month I prepared an hour and a half in-depth training on how to set up and run a local Issues Forum for a seminar in Estonia organized by the e-Governance Academy.
The new slides (6MB) are now up along with the full 90 minutes of audio (mostly in English).
I also managed to stop in […]
A recent discussion in the St. Paul Issues forum demonstrated the power of Issues Forums to:
• touch upon very practical issues that members of the community must deal with
• to draw out illustrative personal stories / examples that inform policy discussions
• share ideas for personal action
A member of the forum posted his frustration at trying […]
I am currently the Forum Manager for the E-Democracy.Org project in Roseville, Minnesota (The Roseville Issues Forum). Recently, someone posted a short announcement about another forum that opened in a neighboring community. I took a look and decided to write a short comparison of the projects, which I posted to the Roseville Issues Forum. I […]